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About The Ecstasy of Influence

National Book Critics Circle Award FinalistA New York Times Notable BookA Best Book of the Year —Austin American-Statesman

Includes a new, previously uncollected piece: “My Internet”

In The Ecstasy of Influence, the incomparable Jonathan Lethem has compiled a career-spanning collection of occasional pieces—essays, memoir, liner notes, fiction, and criticism—which also doubles as a novelist’s manifesto, self-portrait, and confession. The result is an insightful, charming, and entertaining grab bag that covers everything from great novels to old films to graffiti to cyberculture.

About The Ecstasy of Influence

What’s a novelist supposed to do with contemporary culture? And what’s contemporary culture sup­posed to do with novelists? In The Ecstasy of Influence, Jonathan Lethem, tangling with what he calls the “white elephant” role of the writer as public intellectual, arrives at an astonishing range of answers.

A constellation of previously published pieces and new essays as provocative and idiosyncratic as any he’s written, this volume sheds light on an array of topics from sex in cinema to drugs, graffiti, Bob Dylan, cyberculture, 9/11, book touring, and Marlon Brando, as well as on a shelf’s worth of his literary models and contemporaries: Norman Mailer, Paula Fox, Bret Easton Ellis, James Wood, and oth­ers. And, writing about Brooklyn, his father, and his sojourn through two decades of writing, Lethem sheds an equally strong light on himself.

About The Ecstasy of Influence

What’s a novelist supposed to do with contemporary culture? And what’s contemporary culture sup­posed to do with novelists? In The Ecstasy of Influence, Jonathan Lethem, tangling with what he calls the “white elephant” role of the writer as public intellectual, arrives at an astonishing range of answers.

A constellation of previously published pieces and new essays as provocative and idiosyncratic as any he’s written, this volume sheds light on an array of topics from sex in cinema to drugs, graffiti, Bob Dylan, cyberculture, 9/11, book touring, and Marlon Brando, as well as on a shelf’s worth of his literary models and contemporaries: Norman Mailer, Paula Fox, Bret Easton Ellis, James Wood, and oth­ers. And, writing about Brooklyn, his father, and his sojourn through two decades of writing, Lethem sheds an equally strong light on himself.

From the Hardcover edition.

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Praise

“I love this book. . . . Less of a collection than a collage, a cut-and-paste self-portrait in which we see Lethem as he sees himself. . . . A book about a big idea.” —David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

“Begins with this idea of writer-as-magpie and takes it on a communitarian-artistic romp. . . . It’s a grand performance. . . . And delivered with a wink.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Like almost everything Lethem has written, The Ecstasy of Influence is a reflection of, and a pixilated homage to, those whose work he fetishizes. If this book has a thesis, it’s this: For an artist, influence is everything.” —The New York Times

“[An] exuberant whiz-bang of an essay collection.” —The Daily Beast“Hefty and remarkable. . . . Dominating all is Lethem’s prime concern always: the novel. . . . More exciting than any of his interesting-to-terrific fiction.” —Robert Christgau, The New York Times Book Review

“[Lethem is] as sharp a critic as he is a novelist. This collection shows you why.” —Austin American-Statesman

“Lethem takes a boldly different tack on the matter of mentors, gurus, fathers, shapers and sources. . . . He not only acknowledges his literary and psychological progenitors; he insists upon them, celebrates them, and invites the reader to join in an exhilarating if sometimes baffling deconstruction of the very idea of influence.” —The Dallas Morning News

“Lethem’s inspired miscellany is ardent and charming. . . . His essays are zippy and freewheeling.”—Chicago Tribune“Sharp and funny.” —The Plain Dealer“Frank and boisterous. . . . The Ecstasy of Influence is, more than anything, a record of Mr. Lethem’s life as a public novelist, a role for which he is obviously well suited. . . . Mr. Lethem has such a gift, and The Ecstasy of Influence is evidence of it.” —The New York Observer

“This impassioned, voluble book is illuminating about much more than its author.”—The Independent (London)

“The Ecstasy of Influence is in part an attempt to discuss the things artists and writers rarely talk about—how much of their work is borrowed from other artists and how much they care about their critical reputations, among other things.” —Salon“Smart and rollicking. . . . Brilliantly dissect[s] the various sulks, funks, and paranoias of being a writer who moans about doing writerly things—not least among them writing itself.” —The Millions

“A wide and wonderful series of subjects that are threaded together, mostly, as a kind of autobiography of a would-be writer becoming a struggling writer and then a successful writer while all the while remaining a voracious reader.” —National Post (Canada)

“The author invites us into the ecstasy of intertextuality, to the intertwining of thousands of words with ourselves.”—PopMatters

“The arguments implicit in his novels are not merely explicit here, but deliriously so, ecstatically so, as if the author is shaking you by the shoulders to show you what he loves, why he loves it and why you should love it, too.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Table Of Contents

i: My Plan to Begin WithMy Plan to Begin With, Part One The Used Bookshop Stories The Books They Read Going Under in Wendover Zelig of Notoriety Clerk

ii: Dick, Calvino, Ballard: SF and PostmodernismMy Plan to Begin With, Part TwoHolidays Crazy Friend (Philip K. Dick) What I Learned at the Science-Fiction Convention The Best of Calvino: Against Completism Postmodernism as Liberty Valance The Claim of Time (J. G. Ballard) Give Up

iii: PlagiarismsThe Ecstasy of Influence The Afterlife of “Ecstasy”/Somatics of Influence Always Crashing in the Same Car Against “Pop” Culture Furniture

iv: Film and ComicsSupermen!: An Introduction Top-Five Depressed Superheroes The Epiphany Izations Everything Is Broken (Art of Darkness) Godfather IV Great Death Scene (McCabe & Mrs. Miller) Kovacs’s Gift Marlon Brando Breaks Missed Opportunities Donald Sutherland’s Buttocks The Drew Barrymore Stories v: Wall ArtThe Collector (Fred Tomaselli) An Almost Perfect Day (Letter to Bonn) The Billboard Men (Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel) Todd James Writing and the Neighbor Arts Live Nude Models On a Photograph of My Father Hazel

vi: 9/11 and Book TourNine Failures of the ImaginationFurther Reports in a Dead Language To My Italian Friends My Egyptian Cousin Cell Phones Proximity People Repeating Myself Bowels of Compassion Stops Advertisements for Norman Mailer White Elephant and Termite Postures in the Life of the Twenty-first-Century Novelist

vii: Dylan, Brown, and OthersThe Genius of James Brown People Who Died The Fly in the Ointment Dancing About Architecture Dylan Interview Open Letter to Stacy (The Go-Betweens) Otis Redding’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Rick James an orchestra of light that was electric

About Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem is the New York Times bestselling author of nine novels, including Dissident Gardens, Chronic City, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, and of the essay collection The Ecstasy of Influence, which was a National Book Critics Circle… More about Jonathan Lethem

About Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem is the New York Times bestselling author of nine novels, including Dissident Gardens, Chronic City, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, and of the essay collection The Ecstasy of Influence, which was a National Book Critics Circle… More about Jonathan Lethem

About Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem is the New York Times bestselling author of nine novels, including Dissident Gardens, Chronic City, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, and of the essay collection The Ecstasy of Influence, which was a National Book Critics Circle… More about Jonathan Lethem